The Book of Man

Chosen by the American Library Association as one of the best books of 1995, this Scottish novel takes a savagely uncompromising and unsentimental look at the true nature of love and friendship in a city that, like its troubled characters, has lost all its old certainties.Kevin Previn returns to his native Glasgow after an absence of ten years, his homecoming prompted by the death of a friend and mentor, junkie writer Mike Illingworth, author of The Book of Man. Previn believes he's trawling the streets of Glasgow in order to make sense of his old friend's troubled life and death - but he's on a personal journey, a quest to understand his own childhood brutalities and lost loves. Past and present become one as Previn discovers what he has really left behind.